Danese is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by April Gornik. The opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 pm, Thursday, October 13 and the exhibition will continue through November 12.
April Gornik’s paintings of land, sky and sea are rooted in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, stored and remembered. They offer the viewer an opportunity to explore dichotomies between past and present, expanse and its circumscription, stillness and the inexorable momentum of atmospheric change. Her canvases – roiling seas, brewing skies, mountains overlooking endless plains – extend and engage nature’s proscenium. In these captured moments time pauses, the natural world triumphs and calm descends.
Inspired by her travels and the marshes, trees, land and light surrounding her own home, Gornik examines nature in its purest state, capturing its solitude, enormity, and the intrinsic serenity associated with land untouched. It is in this painted space of "intimate immensity," where dueling weather systems, terrain and sky, and the flooding light and growing shadows collide, that "Gornik’s landscape opens out onto psychological experience broadly defined – the modern experience of loss without a lost object. In the manner of a not yet conscious memory, her landscapes intimate the past and so they stir a sense of the past within us." [1]
In 2004, a mid-career retrospective was organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY/Purchase, NY, and traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, NS and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE. In 2009, the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY presented a survey exhibition of her work entitled "The Luminous Landscapes of April Gornik."
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953, Gornik received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Gornik has received a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Guild Hall Academy of the Arts, and the Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS from amFAR. April Gornik lives and works in New York.
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[1] Lang, Karen. April Gornik. New York: Danese, 2008.
